Casablancas Kryptonite

She sat on the couch opposite him and her eyes just cut right through him.

He looked around the room wondering where the hell Beaver had gotten to this time. He had a habit of leaving his girlfriend around the house. He had to admit he was impressed with little Ghostworld. In the big bad Casa de Casablancas without her Cassidy security blanket. She sat there with a straight back and eyes that could have cut glass.

Dad would have liked her.

How could he not, the girl was all guts and brains and too sharp tongue. She was the best of his sons smashed into a cute unassuming package that could hack her way into and out of pretty much anything (according to Beav anyway, he'd have a dark look in his eyes like he thought it was the hottest thing, which honestly he didn't really get.)

Her collar was blue, she was the wrong side of the tracks, she was 02. She shouldn't have felt comfortable here, in one of the largest houses in the 09. Although she didn't look comfortable really, it wasn't that, it was something else, like she was judging it and finding it lacking.

Yeah, Dad would have loved her. He'd married at least three women who had yet to master what Mac had down at seventeen. Maybe it was good he was out of the picture, he didn't think he could stomach his father hitting on her.

She was looking right through him and it chilled and burned all at once that she could do that to him. Like she was looking at him and he just wasn't good enough, like he was the inferior brother. He clenched his teeth and focused hard on her gaze, locking it.

How had this even happened, she hadn't even existed for years. She'd just melted into the background, in her own little computer world, she should feel nervous and awkward and wrong here, cower and blush and fret under his gaze.

He was the better brother, the whole fucking world knew it but she disagreed so violently with the idea without saying a word, it was all eyes and jaw and straight backed movements and he hated every inch of her for it.

Wanted to throw her down and prove just how much better he was than the younger. To have her scream his name instead.

Dick!

Her whole body changed, it softened and warmed and welcomed and he knew without looking that Beaver had appeared behind him, Those things where never there for him, no with him her body was an icy disapproving hard thing, untouchable, painful, she used her whole body as a weapon against him.

bitch.

Her short shorts and band t-shirts and chucks, the chunks of colour in her hair, he was sure were entirely because that was what she wanted, not what she thought Beav would want, which gave her a strange kind of confidence that was surely the draw to her. She made no sense, that's not what girls were supposed to be like.

She stood from the couch and pulled once at the shorts to get them to settle back in place, she smiled brightly behind him and walked passed him, out of the room.

The sound of Beaver and Mac echoing around in the near empty house.

Her laughter bouncing around in his chest painfully like a bullet.